“We are chasing the wrong things, asking ourselves the wrong questions,” she writes. Instead of asking “Can we have it all?,” she says we should be asking, “Do we have enough?”

“All,” she writes, is a constantly shifting target forever out of reach.

As the mother of an autistic child, Lee says she is confronted by people — from her son’s neurologist to her close friends — asking her when she will crack under the pressure of her son’s disability while working and maintaining her writing career.

Her secret, she says, is enjoying what she has. She writes:

It’s not that I go through my life like the implacable Buddha, always in the present, dealing with what needs to be dealt with in a state of serenity and calm. My life — obviously — has many frustrations and disappointments (our son poured out his vegetable juice on our wooden table this morning). But one thing I’ve learned is that the minute I start fixating on what I don’t have — time, money, a child I can send to camp for the summer, central air conditioning — I just feel that much hotter and put-upon, and those bad feelings seem to attract extra obstructions to my day.

As Lee makes clear, having a child with a disability changes the basis of the daily juggle between work and family.